Barack Obama may have introduced the notion of audacity into modern American politics, but it now seems clear that the most audacious politician of the era is not Obama but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Even McConnell's successful transfer of a Supreme Court vacancy from Obama to Donald Trump pales in comparison to the audacity of his current project: to strip millions of Americans of health insurance through a process largely devoid of public input.

Whether McConnell will get his way — a Senate vote before its July 4 recess on a bill written in secret and unveiled just three days ago — depends on whether three or more of the 52 Republican senators are willing to resist the steamroller.

If not, the House, which already passed a plan that would drop 23 million Americans from health insurance rolls, according to the Congressional Budget Office, could simply approve the Senate bill and President Trump could sign it into law by Independence Day.

"We will fight this bill with all we have," Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California said last week, but the truth is there's not much the 48 Democrats and Independents in the upper chamber can do if McConnell is determined to push the measure to a vote this week.

That's why the posture of Republican senators from swing states such as Colorado is so important. Late last week, Cory Gardner sounded worried about the optics of McConnell's rush job.

"If we can have opportunities to make the bill better, then by all means let's take every chance and (all the) time we can," he told the Denver Post.

How Gardner defines making the bill better is anybody's guess, of course. Like many Republican senators, Gardner ran in 2014 on a platform that included repealing and replacing Obamacare. But Obamacare's popularity has increased since then, and polls show little popular support for the Republican proposals to repeal much of it.

Colorado dramatically reduced its percentage of residents without health insurance through the Medicaid expansion that came with Obamacare. The Republicans' Senate bill, like the House bill, would reverse that expansion, and then go further, capping expenditures under the original Medicaid program. Audaciously, it would delay this reversal until 2021-24 in the hope that voters won't notice it until after the elections of 2018 and 2020.

The massive Medicaid cuts — more than $800 billion over 10 years under the House bill, maybe more under the Senate version — would be used to finance tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Other than Charles and David Koch, it's hard to find a constituency for such a tradeoff. We don't hear much of a groundswell to increase income inequality. Indeed, Trump promised not to cut Medicaid during his campaign, not that his promises carry much weight.

The reality is patients without health insurance go to hospital emergency rooms and get treated in the most expensive, least efficacious way possible, with everybody else eventually picking up the tab. That's why the American Hospital Association came out against the Senate bill last week. If Medicaid can't reimburse hospitals for those uncovered emergency room visits, hospitals will have to find another way to pay for them, which means raising prices for everybody else.

"Medicaid cuts of this magnitude are unsustainable and will increase costs to individuals with private insurance," Rick Pollack, CEO of the hospital association, said in a statement. "We urge the Senate to go back to the drawing board and develop legislation that continues to provide coverage to all Americans who currently have it."

Republicans say they want a more market-oriented solution than the various government mandates in Obamacare. This language appeals to conservatives, but it's actually a shell game. The health insurance industry will get paid one way or another. If Republicans succeed in forcing down health-insurance premiums on some policies, it will come at the cost of what those policies cover. Cheaper policies offer less coverage. The Obamacare mandates created a basic level of coverage for everybody with insurance. The Republican plan would eliminate that floor. Millions of Americans would lose coverage entirely and another group could have "coverage" in name only — cheap policies that are largely worthless when it comes to making claims.

The fact is that providing health-care coverage for all, or nearly all, Americans, costs money, and lots of it. The fundamental question is whether we (or our elected representatives) are willing to pay for it.

Coloradans opposed to the massive reversal in public health policy contained in McConnell's bill should make their concerns known to Gardner immediately. And every Colorado voter should remember his response this week when he comes up for re-election in 2020.

"What we're really trying to do is wake up America," Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon said last week. "Because right now, when folks are on summer season, and across America schools are out, and Russia is in the headlines, at this moment it's just [a few] days now before the Republicans want to bring this bill to the floor.

"No committee hearings, no chance for the citizens of America to weigh in, no chance to have a public debate, no chance for amendments in committee, and just a single day on the floor of the Senate, and then it's a done deal. So we need grass roots of America to come out in every possible way and say this is undemocratic, it's unacceptable and raise their voice because we need three Republicans to stand up for our 'We the people' republic and say this secrecy without public input is totally unacceptable here in the United States of America."

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